Kathy Butterly Lots of little love affairs

kathy butterly

KATHY BUTTERLYLots of little love affairs

October 20 - December 22, 2012

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Kathy Butterly’s fourth solo show with the gallery.

Butterly has been creating small clay sculptures spanning her twenty-year career. These intimate objects suggest portraits of the artist’s many-sided emotional personas. Directly referencing the vessel and the body; each work readily becomes anthropomorphized by the viewer.

When making each individual sculpture, Butterly considers the importance of necessity; and in doing so creates objects which require a great amount of skill, balanced with desire and meaning. Each piece unravels itself through responses during the process of creating, and is articulated in form as reactions to current world events, coupled with the artist’s own personal experience at the time.

For a year and a half, Butterly has focused her efforts on the current body of work, which is on view at the gallery. The sculptures vary in scale from smaller forms to a few larger ones. Most of the work is scattered on various sized pedestals congregated in the center of the gallery. Of particular importance to the artist is the glazing process. Through working, Butterly has allowed herself to let go of controlling a final outcome, and instead focused on bearing witness to what the glazes were doing naturally; allowing the colors to present themselves free from the artist’s intent. The tension between the freedom of the glazing process and the more meditated aspects of creating the forms magnify the beauty in the outcome of each piece.

In all of Butterly’s ceramics, one feels a kinship to the humanity and life intrinsic to each piece; there are moments of playfulness, sexuality, awkwardness, and humor, which cannot help but endear you to the work.

Kathy Butterly has recently exhibited at the ICA, Boston in a four person show with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin and Sue Williams. Her work has been shown at the Frances Young Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. She was a recipient of the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant among others. Her work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others.